I can’t remember for the life of me who told me to check out this woman and this book, but I vaguely remember seeing the cover somewhere and instantly knowing that it’d be great. So, so happy to have found this book and Sofie herself. Best parts of the book ahead!
“Beauty is so subjective. It is laughable that we have somehow been tricked into thinking we all should find the same thing pretty.”
I’ve gone back and forth about the idea of cosmetic surgery for years - how it’s great that if you want to change something, you can! Go for it! It’s your life! But also the other side of that coin… just bums me out. There was something in the book that made me (finally, I hope) come to the conclusion that it really just makes me sad that anyone actually believes that they need to change themselves to be “better.” Real change and happiness comes from within yourself and being good to yourself and others. This sounds very after-school-special, yes, but those programs had a good point.
“When fat people say to me, ‘Oh, I could never love myself, I don’t have that confidence,’ I tell them this. ‘You don’t have to have confidence, you just have to be able to understand the basic principles of maths. The more we hate our bodies, the richer these companies get. Ergo, they make us feel bad, in order to make money. Ergo, you do not hate your body because your body is wrong. You hate your body because someone lied to you.’ We believe that the objective truth is that it is a bad thing to be fat. When you realize that is not an objective truth, but rather, someone’s capitalist and very subjective stance, you can begin to let go of the self-hatred.”
“It’s called symbolic annihilation. It’s a term coined in 1976 by George Gerbner to describe the absence of representation in the media. Basically: by not being represented at all, it sends the signal that you don’t matter. It’s a method of making sure that we keep oppressing the same groups of people. If, every time we look at a television, everyone who is not a white man feels a bit worse, it helps to maintain the current system: where the white man is in charge of almost everything. Representation is directly connected to self-esteem - one of the most important traits to possess when asserting yourself in the world. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you believe that you matter more than others, you will place yourself in that position. Likewise, if you feel like you don’t, you will let others assert themselves over you.”
“There are more naked and murdered women on television and in films than there are fat women.”
“I miss the time I really liked Ricky Gervais, you know, before I learned about his general personality.”
Sidenote to me: I have to consciously become less judgmental about what others are wearing. If someone seems happy with their clothing choices, how in the hell is it my business to correct them? Even if it’s only internal thoughts, I don’t want to have them. I feel like if I can actually do this, then I’ll even become more confident with my only choices and less worried what others will think.
“God, imagine if - and this goes for not just all people during your teenage years but essentially for all people in the world - imagine if people were just nice to each other.”
“Men’s opinions of me are irrelevant. Men’s opinions of you are irrelevant too. Yet we are constantly being fed this idea that it matters.”
“There’s an established narrative which says that women have to be thin to be taken seriously, that their worth is based on their fuckability - and so women should be constantly dieting, exercising and chopping up salads in addition to putting on make-up, having a straight fringe, wearing painful heels and expensive perfume and focusing real hard on smiling to everyone but not too much, not enough to be asking for it. They also need to figure out complicated ways of getting home at night in order to not walk through any poorly lit alleyways, and to do reproductive and emotional labor for all the men in their lives. It takes so much hard work, time and effort to be considered an ‘acceptable woman’ that we hardly have time to just exist. We constantly have to reach an impossible standard in order to just be taken a little bit seriously, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s all a trick. If we are meant to be too busy applying lipstick to get involved with politics, business decisions and activism. When women are given the impossible task of ‘get thin and stay thin’, and when this is made the very minimum requirement to receive basic respect, we can see that this is less of a focus on beauty and more of a way of controlling women.”
“Apart from having been brainwashed since birth to believe that thinness is the ultimate ideal, I think we also love the idea that we can control our own mortality. So whilst the obsession with weight loss and dieting stems from a need to control women, our personal obsession with it could also be fuelled by our need to just control something.”
“A fat activist will ask to be treated with respect and the troll on the internet will say, but what about health? as if being unhealthy somehow removes your right to be treated well.”
“The hatred of fat people is not limited to fat people - it is directed at fat in itself. So even if you have one percent body fat, that one percent is something you are meant to hate, even if it does not mean you need two seats on a plane. If everyone decided to take one stab each at the monster that is fatphobia, it would not have to be just up to the fat people to battle it.”
“To hug your stomach and to start believing that it is a sexy, beautiful stomach - it feels good. And if you have gone through life being told that you are worthless and undeserving of good things, sometimes good feelings can feel uncomfortable. We need to get over this because this is essential work - you are going to be you forever.”
“There is no such thing as failure. You have already been failed by the people you expected to be able to trust. You have already felt guilty enough. You have already blamed yourself enough. Part of the hike towards self-love is reuniting with your body and the instincts you had when you were born. Accepting that you act a certain way, eat a certain way, look a certain way. And that it is all okay. You are okay. And you have always been okay. You only ever tried your best.”
Just such a wonderful book, I can’t recommend it enough.